Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

by Matthew Frye Jacobson

Book Overview

America's racial odyssey is the subject of this remarkable work of historical imagination. Matthew Frye Jacobson argues that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the United States. Capturing the excitement of the new field of "whiteness studies" and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674951913
• ISBN13: 9780674951914
• Release Date: September 1999
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

great racial history

Jacobson provides a great deal of the formation of whiteness and how it has changed through time. It shows how the construction of a white race came about in America from Anglo Saxons to all Euroepans. It shows how legislation and attitudes about white ethnic groups and Jews have changed through time. It also takes a good look at how whiteness has been transformed by contacts with other races through non-European immigratin, civil rights and America's colonies such as the Phillipeans.

How we got into this mess...

Matthew Frye Jacobson 's Whiteness of a Different Color tells us all how we got in this mess. The book is subtitled European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. "Alchemy" is correct. It means that the "base metal" of Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean and even Western Asian "races" were turned into the "gold" of unadulterated white status. Jacobson explains how "whiteness" was created by colonial elites for the purpose of defending the state from Indian invasions and slave insurrections, and continued by the American republic in order to create a sense of unity in its polyglot European immigrant population. In 1790, United States naturalization law granted citizenship to "free white persons" -- which meant, mostly, those of Anglo-Saxon descent. As the U.S. population became more culturally mixed beginning in the 1840s, with an increase in immigration from non-Anglo Europe, the nation experienced "a fracturing of whiteness into a hierarchy of plural and scientifically determined white races." In other words, people who came from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Italy, Greece, and Jews from Russia and other Slavic nations all became, by virtue of the "melting pot" ethic, "Caucasian" whites. But, the creation of whiteness was - and still is - by no means an easy, continuous process. The Celtic, Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean "races" were abolished in favor of the myth of one homogenous "white" race (with the adoption of the "scientific" term "Caucasian" providing a new legitimacy to the honorific "racial" term "white." Jacobson contends that traditional historians have deliberately dismissed the "racial" distinctions of the 19th century and before as "misuses" of the word "race." Of course they didn't mean that Irish, Germans, Bohemians, Nordics, etc. were separate races; they just didn't know what they were saying. This is a courtesy not given to mulattoes. Jacobson, however, shows that there was no "misuse." "Patterns in literary, legal, political and graphic evidence" show that the perception of race was very different from the standard rhetoric promoted in today's U.S. I have a sense of deja vu here. As I stated in a review of Lawrence R. Tenzer's The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War, mainstream historians' inability to acknowledge the fact that 19th century Northern "whites" saw predominately European slaves as "white," makes them deliberately blind to the role "white slavery" played as a cause of the Civil War. Few historians wish to deal with the fact that, while "white" privilege in various forms has been a constant in American political culture since colonial times, whiteness itself has been subject to all kinds of contests and has gone through a series of historical vicissitudes. Jacobson divides the history of whiteness in the United States into three great epochs: The nation's first naturalization law in 1790 (limited naturalized citizenship to "free white persons") demonstrates the republican convergence of race and "fitness for self-gove

Contemporary scholarship at its finest.

"Whiteness of a Different Color" is a marvelous work of modern scholarship. In this excellent work of historiography/history, Jacobson explores the American conception of racial "whiteness" and how it has changed over time. This book won virtually every major scholarly award in 1999, most notably the American Studies Association's Award for the best book dealing with American istory and culture.In the 19th century, "whitness" was reserved for Anglo-Saxons, and descendants of immigrants from the British Isles. Slowly, the concept of whiteness evolved to include Northern Europeans and Scandanavians, then other white gentiles, then Jews. Jacobson traces two major influences for this change -- assimilation into the American mainstream and the need to rectuit other "whites" to help polarize the nation between white and black. The previous was common in northern industrial centers and large cities, while the latter was especially prevalent in the Jim Crowe south.This is a modern study because it takes unconventional themes such as the arbitrary construction of "whiteness" and explores it, as opposed to the more traditional form of research, which would include choosing an historical event and studying the facts. "Whiteness of a Different Color" is about people's conceptions, and misconceptions, rather than specific facts. Reflecting on that subject, I wonder if that isn't what's most important.

An excellent piece of scholarly work

In *Whiteness of a Different Color,* Matthew Jacobson draws upon congressional legislation and discourse, historical documents and memoirs, and popular culture in an attempt to explain racism's affect on immigration, American domestic and foreign policy, and the self-perceptions of various racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Jacobson mentions in the preface that it is his hope to move into the foremost rank of immigration experts with this book, and I think that he accomplished what he set out to do. Eloquently written and thoroughly researched, Jacobson, who is obviously very liberal, argues his points in such a way that any person with common sense would agree with him, given the evidence and excerpts included in the book. Everyone involved in American Studies or American History would be well advised to pick up a copy of this book.

A truly remarkable achievement!

Every once in a while, a book comes along that changes both the direction and focus of historical scholarship. Matthew Jacobson's *Whiteness of a Different Color* is one such work. For nearly a decade now, scholars and readers interested in understanding the history of the racial dynamic in the United States have turned almost exclusively to the history of the working class. David Roediger's *Wages of Whiteness* is clearly the best example of a working-class history of the social construction of race, and, indeed, is far superior to other, similarly-minded works, such as Noel Ignatiev's mixed offering, *How the Irish Became White*.Jacobson's work, however, shakes up the history of race, and illuminates a broader, shared history of difference, exclusion, and domination in American life. It is, in short, a truly *cultural* history of race in America. In clear and concise prose, Jacobson plots a long narrative history of race that reflects marked demographic, economic, and cultural changes. Building on the work of Roediger, Alexander Saxton, and others, he reveals the roots of the fragmentation of whiteness in the 1840s, and later demonstrates the forces responsible for the reconsolidation of whiteness in the mid-20th Century--for the near-complete assimilation of European immigrants into a singular "white race." There is, of course, much more here than a history of class-formation and race-consciousness, for *Whiteness of a Different Color* looks at this history of race in light of an abundance of sources drawn from every conceivable corner of American culture. Indeed, so powerful is Jacobson's argument, so forceful is his evidence, that one can only wonder why no one has put this all together before.This is, quite simply, both a book anyone could read, and a book everyone *should* read. It could easily be the foundational text for an ungraduate course in the history of race, and it will likely guide historical thinking on the experience of "assimilation" and "Americanization" for some time.